When the April issue of Men's Journal included Denver on its list of the 25 Best Places to Live in 2010, extolling how "the once dormant downtown of the Queen City of the Plains has been transformed into one of the best in the country for work, owning a condo, and walking to everything from an NBA game to deliberately divey bars," it also touted the city's 245 days of sunshine.
Where's the rest of them?
I've asked Visit Denver, the convention and tourism bureau, for the source of its 300 days stat. If you can come up with it first, I'll give you my special Denver Newspaper Agency umbrella, a collector's item that celebrated the JOA between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. Given those 300 days of sunshine, I rarely needed it -- but with the national media forecast looking cloudy for Denver, it could come in handy.
The Men's Journal blurb about Denver is below (read the entire piece here). The "deliberately divey bars" line is the one most people have been quibbling with, since LoDo is very short on deliberately divey anything.
Denver's biggest selling point has always been what's outside of town -- blue-sky powder days and the largest concentration of peaks higher than 10,000 feet in the country. But over the past decade, the once dormant downtown of the Queen City of the Plains has been transformed into one of the best in the country for work, owning a condo, and walking to everything from an NBA game to deliberately divey bars.The reclamation of LoDo began way back in the '80s, but it was Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, which drew creative chefs and telecommuting urbanites looking to escape bigger cities, that galvanized its reputation as the most sophisticated city in the square states. Hangouts run the gamut from Sinatra-style cocktails at the Oxford Hotel's Cruise Room to burritos and breakfast beers at kitschy-cool El Chapultepec to winemaking in a Quonset hut at Infinite Monkey Theorem. "I work down here and don't have to get in a car until I go skiing," says Chuck Sullivan, co-founder of a local consulting business.
